Founder Stories: For Matt Tucker, A Life’s Work In Building Jive Software


Jive‘s CTO, Matt Tucker, is a pretty unassuming guy. If you didn’t know him, you’d never know Tucker is a co-founder of the 13-year old company, which he helped launch from his college days, which was bootstrapped for the first six years of its life, and which went public in 2011.

Over the arc of Jive’s history, Tucker has assumed roles both as the CTO and Head of Engineering. In this video, we discuss the variance in those technical roles, how he balanced internal-facing duties with external responsibilities, and how they’ve built teams that move offices frequently — as Jive itself is software to help workers collaborate more efficiently.

We also discuss some of the nuances technical leaders face in sharing opinions with team members in ways that aren’t taken as gospel, but instead to foster discussion and debate. Interestingly, Tucker was never interested in wearing the CEO hat, and also talks about why that was the case. For any technical founder out there, Tucker’s story will be of interest.

Editor’s Note: Michael Abbott is a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, previously Twitter’s VP of Engineering, and a founder himself. Mike also writes a blog called uncapitalized. You can follow him on Twitter @mabb0tt.

Disclaimer: KPCB is an investor in Jive.